An interesting way for UV unwrapping a curved pipe in Maya

How to Uv unwrapping a curved pipe in Maya seems a pretty hard thing to do, but it’s really not with the following process.

Uv unwrapping process in general as every 3D artist knows is a tricky and not so much creative process. Some 3D artists even hate the whole process of UVs. Fortunately, I am not one of those people. Although I was in the past. It was a dark period 🙂

UV use:

As a texture artist, you always want to paint a texture by hand or to create it by combining photorealistic images together. In both ways you need a clean UV unwrapped geometry, in order to have the best possible foundation to work with. UV is the flat representation of your 3D model.

UVs (pronounced U-VEEZ) are two-dimensional texture coordinates that reside with the vertex component information for polygonal and subdivision surface meshes.
Autodesk documentation

If you are new to Maya, it’s probably a good idea before you continue reading to take a close look at what UV is. Everything you need to know about UVs in Maya is here.

Feel free to take a look some other posts about UVs in Maya as well:

The process of unwrapping:

One of the challenges of UV unwrapping is to unwrap a curve pipe geometry. It could be quite tricky.

Here is the way that works perfectly for me. By Sindre Opsahl Skaare

Uv unwrapping a curve pipe geometry in Maya is a few steps process:

select the geometry you want to unwrap and use the Unitize function to separate each face in the mesh and have them squarely fill the 0-1 UV space
select the edges where you want the new seems to be
convert the selection to UVs
invert the selection
use the Move and Sew function

That’s pretty much it.

For Maya 2015 – original:

For Maya 2018:

That’s all:

This was a quick and easy way to UV unwrapping a curved pipe in Maya.

Let me know if you stumble into any obstacles during the steps. I am not sure if the process above still works in Maya 2019, although it probably does.

Lastly, another awesome new tool inside Maya that can give you perfect UVs for curved objects is the Sweep Mesh. Feel free to watch the video below:

inspire others:

Vladi Dan

Hey there. I am an experienced 3D Artist - Graphic Designer for over 7 years. Of course, the learning process doesn't really end. I am more than happy to share my personal knowledge with you guys. Let's create and learn some cool stuff together. I hope you join me on this creative trip.